Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI sent a forceful memo to staff, talking about rival Meta’s recent efforts to recruit the company’s top research talent. This comes days after Meta successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join its superintelligence lab.
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.” He also added that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders at the company “around the clock to talk to those with offers.”
“We’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent,” he said.
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While OpenAI seems desperate to retain its staff, Chen also said he has “high personal standards of fairness,” and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. “While I’ll fight to keep every one of you, I won’t do so at the price of fairness to others,” he wrote.
Sam Altman had confirmed reports of Meta trying to “poach” OpenAI employees on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. “[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Sam Altman said on the podcast. “You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year […] I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that,” he said.
Meta eventually succeeded in recruiting three senior researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich team —Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who were added to the tech giant’s “superintelligence” team.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is said to be personally leading Meta’s global AI talent hunt, reaching out directly to top researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs through emails and WhatsApp. According to The Wall Street Journal, he’s been coordinating recruitment through a group chat “Recruiting Party” and following up with private dinners at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.
As of late, Meta seems to be really going all in with its recruitment efforts for advancing AI. Most recently, it recruited Daniel Gross, the CEO of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI). SSI, which was founded in 2024 by Sutskever, Gross, and notable AI researcher Daniel Levy. This decision was made after a failed attempt to acquire the startup.
Meta also hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang in a deal that involved an investment of $14.3 billion in the startup. The deal also gave Meta a 49% stake in Scale AI.
Mark Chen’s remarks come as OpenAI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week. OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge, according to multiple sources. Executives are still planning to work, those sources say.
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While OpenAI’s leadership is taking Meta’s efforts seriously, Chen also said that the company is getting “too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short term comparison with the competition. “We need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to compute (a lot more supercomputers are coming online later this year) into intelligence,” Chen wrote.
“This is the main quest, and it’s important to remember that skirmishes with Meta are the side quest.” Nevertheless, it is clear that the two tech giants are amping up their rivalry as the global AI race becomes more intense.